The sheer volume of news makes it difficult and time-consuming to keep up to date. If you need to know what's vital for the developer, you can rely on I Programmer to uncover the most relevant stories and deliver the highlights each week.

News

You may have heard about the Toyota unintended acceleration case, but you might have missed the analysis of the software that connected the gas peddle to the throttle. Put simply it's frightening enough to make you buy a pre-computer car.

The features in the SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 have been leaked on Reddit ahead of the expected announcement at Build 2014. This adds to the line up of anticipated features that already included a personal digital assistant.

ASP.NET couldn't get more fragmented if it tried. Oh wait, it just has. Project Helios is the latest technology to hit ASP.NET programmers and if you haven't been paying close attention it is going to be very difficult to figure out what it is all about.

The Finnish smartphone manufacturer Jolla which is responsible for the development of the Sailfish OS has announced that its software is moving out of beta and will soon be available for download to Android devices.

A recent security flaw in iOS is down to an error involving a spurious goto statement - but when you look a little more closely there is a bigger lesson to learn from the incident - and not just "goto considered harmful".

This sounds crazy. Cordova, aka PhoneGap, is a system that allows web apps to run on mobile phones as native apps. Now Cordova supports Firefox OS. But Firefox OS native apps are web apps. What's the point?

SnoBots, a team of four kid-size robots trained at the University of Manitoba Autonomous Agents Lab, is getting ready for its second appearance at RoboCup. This video shows them not only to be cute, but also to have surprising agility.

As programmers we often think that users are overly sensitive about their data. What could it hurt to allow the collection of location data, for example. Here is a short video from the ACLU that might make you stop and think about persisting any data you capture.

Google's annual developer conference will take place June 25-26 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Attendees will be will be selected at random from developers who has expressed an interest in the event.

As well as revealing the comparative revenues from apps on different mobile, the recent State of the Developer Nation report also looked into alternative revenue models and shows that your choices matter.

Big Data, Yammer, and SharePoint Online are among the sessions and keynotes announced for European Office 365 Connect, which is being held on April 1st and 2nd at the Philharmonie Theatre, Haarlem, the Netherlands.

Professional Programmer

Yes, it's a monster movie plot but you need to make sure that your sympathies are with the monster. Mozilla is riding high and creating lots of nice open source software, but its position is far from secure. It hangs by a thread and we should be worried.

History

The 1970 saw the rise of languages created by small groups of people rather than committees or institutions and much of the cause was the number of personal computers that had appeared and where in need of software. This is the story of BASIC, Pascal and C.